Thread: Anyone on here have horses?? Need some inspiration for a unit/stalls!!

Just like I said I need some inspiration, Maybe some ideas or any input what so ever would be brilliant! I have no idea what I should be looking at or even looking for?

Any input at all would be a great help. Dave

I have a few.

how many horses are you building stalls for?

Going with ten for the moment (Mine plus a few friends), I also need the ability to expand if needs be. Just need some ideas of what could work and what doesn’t work in a private setting. Most of the larger units here are riding centres that are very labour intensive. This wouldn’t work for me at the moment.

I like the idea of the American style barns because they can be converted with little effort in the future and the fact there’s none here.

How many have you Bignmz04?

My wife is a horse nut...and so is my mom and dad....we breed show quality arabs and have a thoroughbred program....about 20 something arabs..and abou 15-16 throughbreds..give or take..I dont really mess with em. we also have another ranch in new mexico that has more horses..but again, i dont mess with em..I just stick to the cattle.

Things I have seen and learned from my barns
always have an entry and exit for tractors/trucks etc so that hay, feed, and such can be brought in and more importantly cleaned up.
have some sort of angle...water, stalls, and hay dont mix.
drainage drainage and more drainage.
make sure its sturdy...a stallion is a strong sob when there is a mare in heat around.
dont skimp on good food baskets, buckets etc.
if you wanna go high dollar...get a farrier/smith station built in..for shoeing the horses.
have vet "gates" shoots built in...helps a lot...but if also depends if you are breeding or not.
what ever space you want..double it.


how much space do you have all together? aside from the barn/stall..it is suggested that horses need an acre of space per horse minimum.

stall size:
what kind of horses do you have?

A miniature horse would be comfortable in a 6' x 8' stall.
Ponies and small horses, under 900 pounds, can do well in 10' x 10' stalls. But if you have the room, you might want to make the stalls 10' x 12' or 12' x 12' to make the barn more versatile and more appealing to future buyers who might have larger horses.
Riding horses, 900 to 1100 pounds, are usually content in a 12' x 12' stall, which is the industry standard. But, if space is limited, or if horses are not stalled very often or for very long, 10' x 12' will work.
A Warmblood or a small draft horse needs a space from 12' x 14' to 14' x 14'.
A large draft horse requires a 16' x 16' stall.
A foaling stall should be at least twice the size as a single stall for that size horse. To conserve space, it is common to have a hinged or removable partition between two stalls to make a foaling stall as needed. A double stall is also useful when you need to keep a horse in for extended periods, such as when recuperating from an injury, so the horse has more room to move about.

this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Dave, for a 10 stall horse barn with a center aisle your looking at 40 foot wide by 100 foot long roughly. That includes space for tack and storage as well as feed storage. As Bignmz04 stated it depends on your horses as to how big the stall should be. Also how much space you have to work with ..im assuming you have several acres.

i wonder how many horse people we have here on the 4.

Here in Ireland there are mandatory limits for the size of stalls for animal welfare so the size isn’t an issue, I was looking for inspiration mostly as over here at the moment there is a set format and layout as most equine centres are based on pre-existing courtyards, manor houses or purpose built centres.

I was hoping to do something new, extraordinary and different. The idea of just copying an existing equine centre layout isn’t for me.

In total approximately 609 acres (246 hectares)

I worked for a Mech Engineering for a while and one of our projects was a private stable/indoor arena setup. some things that stood out were two seperate stalls that were for grooming and vet. each stall had internal and external doors and we piped water to each stall. I'm drawing a blank what we did for sanitation but we did have drains and maybe a flush out trench.